Perfect for photographing athletes and wild animals, this lens provides ideal performance thanks to impressive features such as a bright F4 aperture and the ultra-telephoto 500mm focal length. Lens construction includes 11 elements in 10 groups developed to deliver beautiful background and foreground defocusing.

Circular Aperture

When changing your aperture to defocus the background, the light sources appear blurred. This ‘bokeh’ effect of the blurred background can be enhanced with circular aperture blades used in this lens. Conventional aperture blades have flat sides creating unappealing polygonal shaped defocussed points of light. α lenses overcome this problem through a unique design that keeps the aperture almost perfectly circular from its wide-open setting to when it is closed by 2 stops. Smoother, more natural defocusing can be obtained as a result.

Nano AR Coating

Effectively suppress reflections that can cause flare and ghosting with Sony’s original Nano AR Coating technology. This precisely defined regular nano-structure allows accurate light transmission, contributing to high-quality images, even more so than lenses with coatings that use an irregular nano-structure. The reflection suppression characteristic of the Nano AR Coating is superior to conventional anti-reflective coatings, providing a notable improvement in clarity, contrast, and overall image quality.

ED (Extra-low Dispersion) glass

As focal lengths get longer, lenses built with conventional optical glass have difficulties with chromatic aberration, and as a result images suffer from lower contrast, lower color quality, and lower resolution. ED glass dramatically reduces chromatic aberration at telephoto ranges, and provides superior contrast across the entire image, even at large aperture settings. Super ED glass provides enhanced compensation for chromatic aberration.

Focus hold button

Once you’ve adjusted focus to where you want it, pressing this button on the lens barrel will keep the lens locked to that focusing distance. The preview function can also be assigned to this button through the camera’s custom settings.

Focus range limiter

This function allows you to set a limit on the focusing range which can save you time during AF operation as the lens will not ‘hunt’ through the entire focusing range. In macro lenses, this limit can be on either the near or far range (as pictured). In the SAL70200G, the limit is set on far ranges only. In the SAL300F28G, focusing can be limited either to a far range or to a range that you specify yourself.

Distance encoder

The distance encoder plays an integral part in ADI flash metering, which delivers high precision flash metering that is unaffected by the reflectance of subjects or backgrounds. The distance encoder is a lens component that directly detects the position of the focusing mechanism, and sends a signal to the CPU in order to measure distance to the subject. During flash photography, this data is very useful in calculating how much flash output is appropriate to the scene.

SSM (Super Sonic wave Motor)

SSM is a piezoelectric motor that contributes to smooth and silent AF operation. The motor produces high torque at slow rotation, and provides immediate start and stop responses. It is also extremely quiet, which helps keep autofocusing silent. Lenses that feature SSM also include a position-sensitive detector to directly detect the amount of lens rotation, a factor that improves AF precision overall.

Internal focusing

Only the middle groups of the optical system move to achieve focus, so the overall length of the lens does not change. Other important benefits include fast autofocusing and a short minimum focusing distance. Also, the filter thread at the front of the lens does not rotate, which is convenient if you’re using a polarizing filter.